Study Finds Extreme Weather Database Exaggerates Global Disaster Trends
Disasters don't count if you don't count them.
by Climate Discussion Nexus August 28, 2025, 12:07 PM
According to its publishers, a dataset called EM-DAT, which stands for Emergency Events Database, so it’s not even an acronym, lists “data on the occurrence and impacts of over 26,000 mass disasters worldwide from 1900 to the present day.” [emphasis, links added]
Which makes it perfect for studying long-term trends. And what’s even better, for the climate change crowd anyway, is that, as the authors of a 2024 study noted, “There are very strong upward trends in the number of reported disasters.”
But as the same authors noted in the very next sentence, “However, we show that these trends are strongly biased by progressively improving reporting.” Simply put, before 2000, reporting of small disasters that caused fewer than 100 deaths was hit-and-miss.
So, historically, the record of giant disasters that killed hundreds or more persons is reasonably complete, but not the record of small ones.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/extreme-weather-database-exaggerates-global-trends/
